WHAT WE KNOW 
ABOUT JESXJS 

BY 

CHARLES F. DOLE D.D. 



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WHAT WE KNOW 
ABOUT JESUS 



BY 



CHARLES F. DOLE, D.D. 



I search after truth, by which man never yet was harmed." 

Marcus Aurelius. VI. 21 



CHICAGO 
THE OPEN COURT PUBLISHING CO. 

LONDON AGENTS 

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1908 



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Dedication 

TO ALL LOVERS OF TRUTH, AND TO THOSE ALSO WHO 
CHERISH SENTIMENT, IN THE FAITH THAT TRUTH AND 
SENTIMENT GO TOGETHER ; THAT NO VITAL SENTIMENT 
CAN BE HURT BY THE TEMPORARY READJUSTMENT 
AND EXTENSION OF THE TRELLIS UPON WHICH IT HAS 
CLIMBED. 



PREFACE 

I am aware that, while some readers will 
approve what I say in this book, others even 
among those who will agree in its conclusions, 
may deprecate my treatment of the life of 
Jesus. All sorts of familiar traditions tend 
subtly to prevent men who have been reared 
in the Christian faith from saying frankly what 
they think about its founder, and often forbid 
them to ask seriously what they do think. Many 
good people fear that the plain truth, if faced 
or uttered, may hurt the cause of religion, if 
not for themselves at least for others. 

My intent in this little book is altogether posi- 
tive, ethical and constructive. I have a firm 
faith that the search for the truth, if only mod- 
est and reverent, is always a wholesome and 
necessary means of moral and spiritual develop- 
ment. I have the same faith in the fearless 
utterance of the truth. The very effort to tell 
the truth and report exactly what we find is 

v 



VI PREFACE 

good for us. Let each lover of the truth do this 
and we open our minds to the light. There can 
be no subject too sacred to throw all the light 
possible upon it. Who can imagine the actual 
Jesus as wishing anyone to evade the question : 
What think ye of Christ? 

A wonderful process of the re-examination of 
all the evidences of religion has been going on 
for more than a century. A mass of cumber- 
some and cruel dogmas has been swept away. 
The churches that still profess to hold them no 
longer Ifeke them seriously. The Bible has 
been reclaimed from a book of mystery to its 
natural place in the literature of the world. It 
is the story of the growth of man's moral and 
religious life. Its noble tea'chings were never 
so clear as now when we see the whole work in 
its real perspective. The lasting foundations 
of religion, as laid in the nature of man, and 
built upon by the noble lives and deeds of each 
new generation, were never so conspicuous as 
now. With every fresh utterance of the men 
who give us their innermost thought about re- 
ligion, there has come in spite of the fears of 
the timid, a new pressure to rest back upon the 




PREFACE Vll 



enduring foundations out of which the good 
life forever springs into being. Call this, if 
you like, an age of question and doubt. It is 
also an age of faith; — faith in truth, faith in 
progress, faith in God and a good universe, 
growing faith in the humanity of every race 
and color. 

The new judgment of the Bible inevitably 
touches the person of Jesus. We cannot con- 
tinue lightly to take for granted certain easy 
assumptions about him. Whereas the world 
has worshiped him as a God for many centu- 
ries, the whole modern tendency is to think of 
him as a man. This idea was in the ancient 
creeds, but it lay dormant in them. The deity 
of Jesus, not his humanity, took pretty nearly 
the whole emphasis. Now that all allow that 
Jesus was a real man, it is high time to try to 
find out what it is to be a man. To be a man 
is to suffer limitations ; it is not to know every- 
thing, but often to be misinformed; it is to 
share in the ideas of one's own time and peo- 
ple; it is to be subject to weariness and to be 
liable to passions; it is to vary in one's moods, 
not to see one's ideals at all times with equal 



Vlll PREFACE 

clearness, not to love even one's own friends 
always with equal ardor ; it is to err at least in 
judgment if not in purpose; it is indeed to fall 
short of that constancy and activity of good- 
ness which we ascribe only to the infinite Good 
Will. The fact is, the psychology of human 
nature makes it hardly possible to conceive a 
real man who, however much he partakes of 
the divine nature, may maintain at all times 
and towards all persons the perfectness of God. 
There is every reason therefore why we should 
take Jesus in earnest when he makes the fa- 
mous reply to the man who called him "Good 
Master:" — "There is none good but one, that 
is, God." 

Few ever ask the question upon what 
grounds we continue to call Jesus the sinless 
or absolute man. I wish to make a study of 
the evidence for this idea. What if it appears 
to be an item of dogma, and not a truth of 
biography? 

A word here is necessary, as to what we 
mean by sinlessness. If we deny the title of 
sinlessness to any man, we mean simply, that 
he is a man, a growing creature, climbing still 



PREFACE ix 



towards an infinite ideal which he has not 
reached. We do not, however, like the me- 
dieval theologians, call a man a "sinner," be- 
cause he is not perfect like God. We do not 
call Jesus a sinner, when we cease to call him 
sinless. We all know people with whom we 
find no fault, "without guile," true-hearted, 
high-minded. There may be no one who pos- 
sesses absolute health, but there are those who 
are generally well and never ill. So there are 
always men and women of natural integrity, 
like the splendid character of Job in the story. 
There is no question but that Jesus belonged to 
this class. 

We shall find that our study requires us to 
separate two words which have grown to- 
gether, namely, Jesus and Christ. They repre- 
sent different ideas. The one, beginning with 
a local and national meaning, namely, the Jew- 
ish Messiah, Prince, or Savior, has developed, 
till it has really come to be for millions of people 
another and more intimate name for God. It is 
the name of the God of Humanity. If this word 
"Christ" were once freed of all supernatural or 
dogmatic suggestion, it is conceivable that the 



X PREFACE 

people of all religions might come to use it to 
express their highest and fullest conception of 
the Infinite Goodness. It is evident, however, 
that when the word Christ has developed so as 
to hold the total content that is associated with 
the older word "God," we mean by it some- 
thing different from the prophet of Galilee. 
This Christ, or God, was doubtless in Jesus, as 
he is in all true men. This God is present in 
human life and history, but the man Jesus is 
not also present, in any other sense than Paul 
or Isaiah is. So much for the development of 
the word "Christ." 

Meanwhile the first movement of thought 
about the man Jesus was to lift him also into 
the rank of infinite beings. The words "Jesus 
and Christ" came to be used interchangeably 
and to be molded together, till at last Jesus 
was called the absolute God, who should "come 
to judge the world !" The modern thought of 
the world has already almost rescued Jesus' hu- 
manity. We are assured that he was a real 
man, in spite of the natural flutter of timid 
souls. Nothing* but good has come of this 
process of the rehabilitation of the actual Jesus. 



PREFACE XI 

The thought of the world, however, cannot 
stand still midway in a process. The process 
must go on. The development is inevitable. 
We cannot honestly believe Jesus to be a man, 
and still hold him between heaven and earth, 
where no other man ever was. He was raised 
to be more than man for a dogmatic purpose; 
namely, so as to die for men's sins. When that 
purpose fails, no speculative reason remains to 
hold Jesus above the ranks of the great and 
illustrious who have led the march of mankind. 
At any rate, there is nothing to make us fear 
to be free to ask just what kind of human life 
the real man Jesus lived. There is nothing to 
give more than a temporary shock to anyone's 
sentiment in case we find that Jesus' humanity 
was precisely like our own. Do we not love 
our friends even when on occasion we depre- 
cate their words or actions ? What man, how- 
ever high his intent, is so infallible as never 
to err? 

The movement of thought about Jesus is just 
like the similar process touching the Bible. 
They used to tell us of the divineness and in- 
errancy of every word of the Scriptures : then 



Xll PREFACE 

we discovered that there were mistakes in the 
Bible, and we were presently assured that these 
mistakes never affected the teaching of reli- 
gion. Then we passed on to be told, that while 
the Old Testament was more or less doubtful 
in its teachings, the New Testament remained, 
or at the last resort, the very words of Jesus 
were final authority. Now at last we are tak- 
ing our full liberty with the whole Bible. We 
treat it as the library of a notable people. We 
recognize the vast differences of le\ T el in it ; we 
read along with it other inspired books and 
poems, enjoy all of them, and give each the 
weight that belongs to it. We are thus not 
poorer but richer in our spiritual assets. 

So we may expect to find with the life of 
Jesus. He is not a God, but a man. What 
then if he appear to be truly a man ? What if 
we use our minds and our consciences, touching 
his words and conduct, as we do with all other 
men ? What if we differ from him in thought 
and judgment, as we differ from others? 
What if we find differences of level in his 
teachings, as we have already found in the 
Bible generallv, and as we find in other great 



•PREFACE Xlll 

teachers? What if we are free, while taking 
him as a great helper towards the good life, to 
discover other noble friends to whom we give 
our hearts also. Is love or admiration any the 
less because it goes out like the light in every 
direction ? 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

Preface v 

I. The Problem i 

II. The Real Man in Two Aspects 12 

III. Two Kinds of Teaching 34 

IV. The Question of Messiahship 52 

V. Jesus as the Founder of Christianity ... 70 

VI. Certain Positive Conclusions 77 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT 

JESUS 

I 

THE PROBLEM 

There is one person who doubtless occupies 
the most commanding position in human his- 
tory. From the supposed date of his birth the 
most progressive and civilized nations measure 
time. Hundreds of millions of people bow at 
his name. Vast systems of religion trace back 
to him as their founder. Grand temples in 
every quarter of the earth hold him in memory 
and keep festivals for his sake. Libraries of 
books have been poured out and are still poured 
out from the scholarly and literary workshops 
of the world, making this one man's words the 
central point of their discussion. Along with 
men's traffic in wheat or in wine, the Bibles go 
also, telling to new readers the story of Jesus. 
All this is very wonderful. 



2 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

AYhat sort of man was Jesus? AYe mean 
the actual, historic person. Leave aside, at 
least for the time, the answer of the creeds to 
the question, ''Who Jesus was." The creeds 
all confess that he made an impression as a 
man. We wish to get some idea what this 
human impression Avas. Is it possible, for ex- 
ample, to compose a biography of Jesus, or at 
least a sketch of his life ? 

From any point of view our problem must be 
extremely difficult. It is no slight task indeed 
to obtain a really clear and lifelike, not to say 
accurate, description of a man of our own stock 
and language, and as near our own time as 
Channing and Washington, only a hundred 
years ago or less. But in Jesus' case we have 
to make our way back nearly twenty centuries. 
We peer dimly through hundreds of years 
where books, or rather manuscripts, were ex- 
tremely rare, and careful scholarship as we 
know the term was rarer still ; we reach back to 
an age of superstition and credulity; we come 
at last upon a few bits of writing which con- 
stitute almost the sole authority of our knowl- 
edge for the beginnings of Christianity: I 




THE PROBLEM 3 

mean the New Testament books, the Gospels, 
the Acts, and the Epistles. Outside of these 
writings we know nothing authentic about 
Jesus. Moreover most of the New Testament 
does not profess to give us any information 
about him. Paul obviously had only the slight- 
est acquaintance with his teachings, which he 
hardly more than quotes once, or of his historic 
life which he seems to slight in favor of a some- 
what mystical theory of his personality. We 
are shut up to the four Gospels, three of them 
in large part merely parallel with one another, 
and the fourth, a psychological problem at the 
best to every one who studies it carefully. 

As to the Fourth Gospel, candor compels the 
admission that all its material, whether of story 
or teaching, has passed through the alembic of 
a mind so subtle, so mystic, so individualistic, 
that you can never distinguish the substance of 
his own contribution of thought and sentiment 
from the original matter with which he deals. 
His literary style, his somewhat philosophical 
interests, his allusions, as for example, to the 
Jews, as though they were a foreign people, his 
extraordinary discrepancies from the synoptic 



4 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

Gospels, make it wellnigh incredible that the 
work comes from an actual disciple of Jesus, 
least of all, a Galilean fisherman. The best 
that any one can claim is, what Matthew Ar- 
nold suggested, that the author had some rela- 
tion to John, or had certain traditions from 
him. At the best, we are not shown in this 
Gospel a real and tangible man. It is not veri- 
table flesh and blood; it is an ideal character, 
about no single incident of whose career, and 
no distinct paragraph of whose doctrine can 
you be certain that you rest upon the bed-rock 
of fact. It is precisely like certain early paint- 
ings of Jesus in which the artist had obviously 
put his own ideal on the canvas. The picture 
is interesting, but it is not the actual Jesus 
whom we seek. At any rate no one can ever 
be in the least confident that the treatise makes 
us better acquainted with the actual Jesus, 
while all the presumption is against such con- 
fidence. 

Setting the Fourth Gospel aside, as we must 
if we ask for reality, we confessedly have no 
narrative from the pen of an eye witness or 
acquaintance of Jesus. All the four Gospels 



THE PROBLEM 5 

indeed are anonymous. The most conserva- 
tive student cannot throw one of them, in its 
present shape, back to within a generation of 
the time of Jesus' death. There is nothing to 
show that, growing slowly out of traditions 
and reminiscences more or less accurate, and 
possible early bits of memories of Jesus' say- 
ings, the Gospels were not a hundred years in 
shaping themselves as we now have them. It 
is most unlikely that they took the form of the 
Greek language in Palestine, but rather that 
they developed far away from where Jesus 
lived, in order to meet the demands of foreign 
communities. This was an age when the most 
extraordinary happenings were looked for and 
eagerly believed. Moreover, the earliest 
Christian books had their growth beyond the 
range of any hostile criticism. ' We have only 
to mention the name of Christian Science, not 
to say Persian Babism, to remind ourselves 
how all sorts of wonderful stories, once easily 
started and springing out of the soil, tend to 
move on and get accretions in an atmosphere 
that craves material on which to nourish its 
faith. 



6 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

Bearing these considerations in mind, what 
matter of solid knowledge about Jesus do we 
find in our Synoptic Gospels ? A few pages at 
the most — the amount of a little pamphlet — 
out of which all the ponderous biographies 
have been elaborated, without the addition of 
practically a single incident or important new 
teaching. 1 A considerable part of the mate- 

1 There are 2,899 verses in the three Gospels. Prac- 
tically the whole substance of Mark with its 678 verses is 
incorporated bodily in one or both of the other evangelists. 
Except for the birth stories and the expansion of the resur- 
rection story there is little new material touching Jesus' 
life in Matthew or Luke that is not already contained in 
Mark. We gain in the two larger Gospels, however, a con- 
siderable expansion of his teachings, especially in the matter 
of "the Sermon on the Mount," and the parables. More than 
a fourth of Mark, or about 180 verses, consists of the miracles 
or wonder-stories. More than another fourth, or about 200 
verses, consists of Jesus' teachings. Only about 160 verses, 
or less than a fourth, give us the story of Jesus, aside from 
the teachings and wonder-stories. Of this portion one-half 
is the story of his trial and death. A certain remainder of 
the Gospel, such as the narrative of John the Baptist, refers 
to other subjects besides the story or teachings of Jesus. 
The amount of strictly biographical material in the other 
Gospels is not much greater than in Mark, — perhaps 200 
verses in Matthew, more than half of which is the story of 
the trial and death, and 180 verses in Luke with 80 verses 
about the last days. Outside of the last days of Jesus' life, 
we cannot claim to have altogether in all the evangelists the 
amount of more than about two chapters of fifty verses each 
of strictly biographical material, besides perhaps seven chap- 
ters of wonder-stories, and eight or nine chapters of teach- 
ings. 



THE PROBLEM 7 

rial consist in wonder-stories or miracles. 
The story of the final days of Jesus' life, con- 
cluding with his trial and death, makes a gen- 
erous percentage of the whole narrative. The 
connection of events is slight: we can never 
know how long Jesus spent in public life, — 
barely more than a year, if we only consult the 
Synoptic Gospels. Except for the bit of story 
from Luke about his visit to Jerusalem at the 
age of twelve, we know nothing except his 
parentage from Joseph and Mary, till he sud- 
denly appears, a mature man, from a possible 
period of sojourn in the desert, waiting among 
the crowd who come to the baptism of John at 
the Jordan. Only a very few personal incidents, 
here and there a glimpse as of one passing 
us in the street, serve to reveal the real man. 
How we strain our eyes to see what he looks 
like, to catch the tone of his voice, to get for 
one long moment the clear impress of his per- 
sonality. Who can honestly say that he ever 
feels acquainted with Jesus? What modern 
admirer of his would really leave his business 
and accompany Jesus in his wanderings ? 
Moreover, thanks to an army of scholars 



8 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

and critics, dissecting every verse in the New 
Testament, we have arrived at such a point of 
uncertainty as to the relative value of differ- 
ent elements in the Synoptic Gospels, that 
every one practically may take what he likes, 
both of the narrative and teaching, and reject 
as unauthentic or improbable whatever seems 
to him incongruous or unworthy. Does a 
modern man shy at the birth stories in Mat- 
thew and Luke? There is every reason to be- 
lieve that they never formed a part of the 
earlier tradition about Jesus; in fact they con- 
fuse and defeat one another. Does any one 
doubt the story of the resurrection of Jesus' 
body? All the best scholars are with him in 
the doubt; the different stories discredit each 
other. Does one like to believe that Jesus 
cursed the figtree, or sent a horde of demons 
to destroy the Gadarene peasants' swine? 2 
No one needs to believe anything that he may 
deem an accretion upon the Gospels. Does 
any one question whether Jesus prophesied the 
speedy end of the world in the famous and 
numerous verses concerning the Second Com- 

2 Mark v. I, etc. 



THE PROBLEM 9 

ing of the Son of Man ? 3 Then, this whole 
group of teachings may be modified to any ex- 
tent or quite swept away ! Does any one, on the 
other hand, find the beatitudes scattered about 
in the Old Testament, and the Golden Rule 
already enunciated there ? Very well ! There 
are two quite different versions of the beati- 
tudes in any case, with much unlikelihood that 
Jesus himself performed the feat of genius in 
grouping them together, as we now find them, 
in Matthew. 4 

How many clearly authentic utterances have 
we from Jesus? What can we rest upon? 
What exactly did he do ? What did he say of 
himself and his mission? What command- 
ments did he lay down, or what ordinances did 
he establish? What new ideas if any did he 
contribute ? The answers to all these questions 
must be found if at all, in the study of a few 
pages of the Synoptic Gospels. No one is 
sure, or can possibly be sure, of these answers. 
The light is too dim in that remote corner of 
the Roman Empire of the First Century where 



3 E. g. Matt. xxiv. 

4 Compare Matt, v.-viii. with Luke vi. 



10 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

we are at work deciphering, as it were, a series 
of palimpsests. 

It might be said, changing our figure, that 
we find a very remarkable torso or at least the 
fragments of a statue. Amiel has said some- 
thing of this sort about the remains from which 
we have to construct the life of Jesus. This 
is surely all that any one can say. But a torso 
is definite and complete as far as it goes; frag- 
ments and pieces are firm in your hands; you 
can match them together: you can reconstruct 
the torso. The fragments in our case crum- 
ble; they are mixed with other fragments; if 
they combine, they never form one and the 
same combination. You have not one Jesus, 
but two or more, each with differ ent elements, 
more or less, and no one into which it is possi- 
ble to harmonize all the material even of our 
bit of a pamphlet made up from the three short 
Synoptic Gospels. 

I am merely stating facts to illustrate the 
enormous difficulty of the proposition, so often 
glibly quoted, — "Back to Jesus." There is no 
evidence that those who repeat this phrase ever 
have tried to find the actual Jesus. What they 



THE PROBLEM II 

say of him, their descriptions and paintings 
and panegyrics, almost never appear like the 
genuine work of even tolerable copyists. 
There are second-hand artists who have at 
least seen original work. But the conven- 
tional descriptions of Jesus not only vary ; they 
never seem to have been near an original. 
The more complete and entertaining they are, 
the nearer they come to being pure creations 
of the author's mind. They are German, or 
Italian, or English, or American pictures, and 
generally somewhat modern. They are not 
Hebrew, whereas Jesus was a Jew of twenty 
centuries ago. 

We are bound to say these things frankly, 
if we say anything. It is not my part, even 
if I were able, to add another fancy picture to 
the gallery of the Lives of Jesus. I can only 
report what I find. I find and present a prob- 
lem. I do not think it can ever be solved. 
But it suggests certain important and practical 
considerations. 



II 

THE REAL MAN IN TWO ASPECTS 

The fault with the conventional method of 
approach to the study of Jesus consists in the 
effort, by a sheer tour de force, to make the 
portrait of a harmonious, consistent and ideal 
character, and to establish a well-rounded and 
absolute system of doctrine. This is what 
men have expected, and insisted upon discover- 
ing. The bondage of the old-world thought 
of Jesus, as a supernatural being, has prevailed 
even over the minds of most modern scholars. 
If here and there a student has ventured to 
tell the straight story of what he really found 
in the Gospels, people have lifted up their 
hands in protest. But granting to Jesus real 
humanity, and not a mere docetic appearance 
of a man, why should we not expect to find in 
him, — a true child of his age, a veritable "son 
of man," — at least the usual characteristics of 
humanity ? 

12 



THE REAL MAN IN TWO ASPECTS 1 3 

I am constrained to believe that we have, 
first in the narrative, and then next in the 
teachings ascribed to Jesus, "not one perfected 
person, but dissimilar aspects or sides of a per- 
son himself in the process of natural develop- 
ment; not one consistent and perfect scheme 
of doctrine, as if revealed from heaven, but 
diverse forms of thought. 

Let us gather the bits of the story, such as 
make the basis for the idea of the perfect and 
sinless Christ. You will be surprised how few 
these passages are and how far short they fall 
of making such a picture. I mean the kind 
of passages that give you a lifelike touch of 
the man. For example, the picture of Jesus 
sitting weary at the well, with his free and 
democratic willingness to talk with the woman 
of Samaria, 1 is the kind of material that we 
should like to feel certain about. So is the 
little story about the woman taken in adultery, 
inserted as an addition to the Fourth Gospel. 2 
We hope that this is a valid piece of tradition. 
It gives us the great and lovable Jesus. The 

1 John iv. 6, etc. 

2 John viii. I, etc. 



14 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

story of the home in Bethany and Jesus' 
friends there suggests a glimpse of reality. 
The verse "Je sus wept" in the story of Lazarus 
might be adduced, if it were not hopelessly 
complicated with the difficulties of a wonder 
story. Why should Jesus weep if he knew 
that he carried the victorious power to release 
his friend from death? Why on the other 
hand should he have purposely stayed away, as 
no friendly physician does, needless hours 
after he was summoned to his friend's house? 3 
One might also like to add from the same 
Gospel the relation of Jesus to the beloved 
disciple who lay on his breast at the supper. 
This may present an actual scene. If so, it 
is what we are looking for. Shall we add the 
story of Jesus washing the disciples' feet ? 4 
I confess this seems to me artificial and, if true, 
symbolic. We rather shrink from acts done 
for the sake of example. In real life there is 
no need of doing such acts. This story in- 
deed falls in with the mystical theory of the 
unknown author. Again, we should like to be 

3 John xi. 
* John xiii. 4. 



THE REAL MAN IN TWO ASPECTS IS 

sure of the incident where Jesus on the cross 
commends his mother to his favorite disciple, 5 
all the more that we cannot from any point 
of view enjoy the manner of Jesus to his 
mother, as related in a familiar passage in the 
synoptists. 6 Aside from these few and scat- 
tered passages, we can hardly find any bio- 
graphical material in the Fourth Gospel, even 
granting its historicity, which acquaints us 
with the great, noble, lovable Jesus. 

On the other hand, the general portraiture 
of Jesus in the Fourth Gospel hardly impresses 
us as winning or lovable. We are constantly 
disturbed by the language of egotism and self- 
assertion continuously put into Jesus' mouth 
in accordance with the author's evident con- 
ception of a mystical and Messianic personage, 
not a veritable man. The constant use of the 
word "I" almost spoils the Gospel for profit- 
able Scripture reading to a modern congrega- 
tion. Moreover, John's Jesus repeatedly as- 
sails, provokes and castigates the leaders of 

5 John xxv. 28-31. 

6 Matt, xii, 47; Mark iii, 31; Luke viii, 19; see also John 
ii. 4. 



1 6 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

his people. 7 All this portraiture, judged by 
our highest standards of conduct, is unworthy 
of the best type of man, not to say a good 
God. We willingly put the Fourth Gospel 
aside, content to believe that its writer never 
knew Jesus and accordingly misrepresents 
him. It should be added that our ethical diffi- 
culty would be still greater if it could be 
demonstrated that Jesus' disciple John was 
the actual author. For we should then be 
obliged to take seriously all the harsh and even 
inhumane elements in the Gospel. a 

Turn now to the Synoptic Gospels and mass 

7 See for example the passage John viii. 33~59- 

8 The Fourth Gospel gives over 200 verses of narrative 
concerning Jesus, besides 150 verses which relate a few se- 
lected miracles. How little of this material goes to exhibit a 
living man has been shown already. Even the miracles are 
performed for the purpose of demonstration (see John xi. 
4, 15). Of the considerable amount of teachings, about, 300 
verses or six long chapters in all, we may gather perhaps 
fifty verses as containing precious or universal value. The 
best of this is exceedingly similar to the best material, namely, 
the doctrine of love, in the First Epistle of John. Of the 
remaining sayings, fifty verses or more, are, from an ethical 
point of view, unsuitable for general use, or even repug- 
nant to the moral sense. Thus, "Have not I chosen you 
twelve and one of you is a devil" is full of difficulty to the 
modern mind (John vi. 70, see also ix. 39) ; and in xvii. 9, 
the words : "I pray not for the world." Why not, from one 
who loved all men? 



THE REAL MAN IN TWO ASPECTS 1 7 

together what we may find. We note first 
Jesus' sturdy democracy. He eats and drinks 
at publicans' houses. What radical freedom 
of convention this was! It was as if we had 
a story of Channing or Theodore Parker, as 
seen arm in arm with a liquor dealer. Jesus' 
associates for the most part are humble per- 
sons of the social class from which he himself 
sprang. We read of his constant compassion 
and spirit of mercy, especially as shown to the 
poor in works of healing. 

These wonders of healing make up so large 
a portion of the whole narrative, as to tend to 
obscure the portrait of the real Jesus. To the 
student of psychology they fall into line with 
similar wonder-stories which appear through 
human history from the tales about Elijah and 
Elisha to the miracles at Lourdes, or the ex- 
periences related in a Christian Science Tem- 
ple. You will hardly be able to doubt that in 
Jesus' case these numerous stories must have 
grown out of a reputed power, analogous to 
what we believe exists in certain men and 
women to-day, to soothe or quiet, or again to 
rouse nervous and sick people and to help them 



l8 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

to stand upon their feet. However we may 
handle the wonder-stories, they seem to repre- 
sent one striking characteristic in Jesus, 
namely, his humanity and his sympathy. 
Here is a warm heart towards those who suf- 
fer. I hardly know, however, why we need 
to be surprised in finding this character in 
Jesus. We all know people in whom likewise 
benevolence is a passion. There are phy- 
sicians who are daily giving their lives, without 
thought of praise, for the healing of people. 
They love, as Jesus did, to "go about doing 
good." This is a quite natural form of human 
activity. 

The story about Jesus and the little chil- 
dren 9 is one of the conspicuous bits of per- 
sonal narrative. All the world loves that pic- 
ture. We love it because we all love children, 
just as Jesus did. It is a natural story. We 
like also the little human touch in Mark x. 21, 
where Jesus falls in love with the rich young 
man who comes to him with questions. 

Furthermore, we get bare glimpses of Jesus 
in the scene with the woman who brings oint- 

9 Mark x. 13. 



THE REAL MAN IN TWO ASPECTS 19 

ment at Simon's house; 10 in his visits to Mary 
and Martha; 11 in the story of Zacchaeus; 12 
of the widow's mite, 13 and of his lamentation 
over Jerusalem. 14 Such passages give an idea 
of a quite independent and original character, 
direct and outspoken in his judgments, in- 
tense in his feelings, thoroughly human, who 
readily commanded attention and regard. 

We observe in passing that at the time when 
the Gospels received their present form, the 
dogmatic conception of Jesus as a supernat- 
ural personage has evidently made its impress 
on the story. It is already the story, not so 
much of a real man as of a wonder-worker and 
a Messiah. This trend of thought dominates 
the Gospels and makes it very difficult to find 
the real man whom we are seeking to discover. 

I have purposely put aside the story of the 
temptation. For it reads like a series of 
dreams; it belongs to an unreal world; it cer- 
tainly suggests no such actual temptation as 

10 Luke vii. 44. 

II Luke x. 38. 

12 Luke xix. 

13 Luke xxi. 1, etc. 

14 Matthew xxiii. 37, etc. 



20 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

come to flesh and blood men outside of mon- 
asteries. It is also complicated with the doc- 
trine of devils. So far as it presents the fact 
of resistance to real and human temptation, 
there is nothing specially striking about it. 
The wonder is that any of the three items 
related could have constituted temptation to a 
sane intelligence. 15 

There remain the longer stories of Jesus' 
trial and death. There is an atmosphere of 
traditional mystery about this series of events. 
The famous saying is that "Socrates died 
like a philosopher but Jesus like a God." 
There is here no such valid distinction. If 
Jesus had some mystic consciousness of the 
outcome of his death, he might well have 
been buoyed up as if angels were about him. 
If the shadows, however, gathered over him 
as over others in the last hour, then we can 
only say, what we also say of countless deaths 
of heroes and martyrs, that he met his death 

15 Grant, however, that by the orthodox theory Jesus was 
a man completely possessed at all times with the Logos, or 
the "Eternal Christ," he was thereby lifted above the level, of 
temptation, and equally (it would seem) above the possibility 
of growth. But this assumption produces an unreal man. 



THE REAL MAN IN TWO ASPECTS 21 

sturdily as they did too. The glory of our 
common humanity indeed is that it is nothing 
uncommon for men to be willing to die for 
truth, or duty, or love. There are always men 
who would leap at the chance of any mode of 
death that would lift the whole world to a new 
level of welfare. This is no depreciation of 
Jesus, but rather the just recognition of in- 
finite values in human life to which a whole 
host of noble people have risen. 

There are different versions of Jesus' last 
words upon the cross. Matthew and Mark, 
following apparently the earlier tradition, 
dwell upon the sad cry: "My God, my God, 
why hast thou forsaken me?" This would 
seem to stand for the last abandonment of hope 
in Jesus' mind that the arm of God would 
come to his rescue. Luke, on the contrary, 
following a later tradition, omits this cry of 
despair and gives instead the beautiful words: 
"Father, forgive them for they know not what 
they do;" and, "Father, into thy hands I com- 
mend my spirit." We are left in doubt as to 
which mood of mind, the despairing or hope- 
ful, Jesus at last took. We should be glad to 



22 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

believe the latter, for the like of which we 
could cite other brave instances. 

Let us turn now from the too meager mate- 
rial, which serves to furnish our imagination 
for the portrait of the great and lovable Jesus, 
to consider another and somewhat perplexing 
variety of material. 

As with other human lives, so with Jesus 5 
life, there is, even in the scanty glimpses of 
him given in the Gospels, more or less matter 
of difficulty, misunderstanding or outright in- 
consistency. We have to mention first Jesus' 
habitual attitude toward the class known as 
Pharisees. He never seems to show them any 
sympathy. He upbraids and denounces them 
and calls them by harsh names, as hypocrites, 
as a generation of vipers, 16 and, if one could 
believe the Fourth Gospel, as "children of the 
wicked one:" "Ye are of your father the 
devil." 17 Few realize how many such pas- 
sages there are. It is easy to go with these 
denunciations against people whom we do not 
like. But Jesus' doctrine of forgiveness "until 

16 Matthew xii. 34. 

17 John viii. 44, cf. Matt, xxiii. 15. 



THE REAL MAN IN TWO ASPECTS 23 

seventy times seven," as well as the general 
law of love, would seem to raise a great moral 
interrogation mark against the considerable, 
mass of such passages which characterize his 
public utterances. Why should not all kinds 
of spiritual disease, and not only the vices of 
the poor require patience and sympathy ? Cer- 
tain it is that the world has gone on for hun- 
dreds of years citing Jesus' example for all 
kinds of denunciation of the poor against the 
rich and of the virtuous against the profligate, 
especially against the sins of those who are not 
in our own social group. 

This consideration is brought out all the 
more strongly in the tremendous incident of 
Jesus driving the money changers out of the 
temple. 18 Note that the last Gospel sets this 
story at the beginning of Jesus' public life. 
This story matches indeed with the theory of 
a supernatural and terrible Messiah. But as 
the story of an actual man, it is nothing less 
than an act of anarchy, like lynch law. How- 
ever noble Jesus' purpose ( supposing the story 
a true one), he did as in the case of John 

18 Matt. xxi. 12; Mark xi. T5; Luke xix. 45; John ii. 15. 



24 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

Brown at Harper's Ferry, what he had no right 
to do. Why did he not condemn the conven- 
tional bloody sacrifices that went on in the 
temple? For, if the sacrifices were necessary, 
the worshipers must somehow be provided 
with the necessary animals to offer at the 
altars. Why was this not as legitimate a busi- 
ness as that of the priests? At any rate, as a 
man, Jesus had no warrant to lift the whip 
over men and to destroy their property. 

The stories of the Gadarenes' swine and the 
cursing of the fig tree are both incredible and 
unworthy of the Jesus whom we love to ad- 
mire. 19 We will throw them aside. What 
shall we say of his treatment of the poor Syro- 
Phenician woman ? 20 Do you say that Jesus' 
harsh words to her, likening her to a dog, 
were only used to bring her faith into relief? 
But this answer does not commend Jesus' 
method to our sense of delicate fitness. More- 
over, the words fall into line with the instruc- 
tions to the apostles, not to go into the way of 
the Gentiles or into any city of the Samari- 

19 Mark v. 12 and xi. 12. 

20 Mark vii. 26. 



THE REAL MAN IN TWO ASPECTS 25 

tans, but only to the lost sheep of the house of 
Israel. 21 This type of narrowness certainly 
makes discord with the keynote of the Parable 
of the Good Samaritan. Grant that we are free 
to discard these sayings, as an alien growth 
upon the pure words of Jesus. Yet it is hard 
to see how they can have been put into Jesus' 
mouth in the face of a clear and consistent 
doctrine to the contrary. Is it not easier to 
believe that Jesus was like many another good 
but quite human teacher in the utterance of 
varying moods and strata of thought? We 
shall have occasion to return to this same 
problem later, when we take up the two aspects 
of Jesus' teachings. 

If we care now to turn once more to the 
Fourth Gospel, there is a well-known passage, 
mistranslated in the common version, where 
Jesus tells the people that he is not going up 
to the Feast in Jerusalem, whereas the context 
makes it quite plain that he really is on his 
way there. 22 I do not attribute this apparent 
prevarication to Jesus. I only mention it to 

21 Matt. x. 6. 

22 John vii. 8. 



26 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

illustrate the fact that neither the author of the 
Gospel, nor probably any one else at that time, 
would have thought it wrong to prevaricate. 

Neither do I attribute to Jesus the harsh 
word to his mother at the wedding at Cana: 
"Woman, what have I to do with thee?" But 
that it could'have been related so naively shows 
how far from nice the ideal standard of the 
time was in Jesus' age. 

We have still to meet the harsh, though 
somewhat mystical, conduct of Jesus toward 
his mother and brethren as told in Matthew 
xii. 46 etc. We should prefer to drop this 
passage from the narrative. 

Emphasizing again how few passages there 
are in all the Gospels which throw any light 
on Jesus' real personality, I hasten on now 
to the comparatively full description of his trial 
and death. I cannot here avoid a perplexity 
that grows upon me the more I consider it. 
From the older and orthodox point of view it 
was necessary that Jesus should be put to 
death for the salvation of mankind. It was so 
necessary that it may have seemed justifiable 
to provoke men's anger against their innocent 



THE REAL MAN IN TWO ASPECTS 2*] 

victim so as to secure the fated doom. 23 All 
this theological prearrangement seems to us 
modern men artificial and incredible. It will 
not fit into a reasonable philosophy. The as- 
sumed character does not fit our ethical ideal. 
The question then recurs, why Jesus should 
have incurred death? The story, shorn of its 
supernatural features, does not hold together. 
It fails at least to give us a clear understanding 
of the animus of Jesus' enemies, or of Jesus' 
conduct. 

We have yet to consider the problem of his 
alleged claim to some kind of Messiahship. It 
it enough to say now that if, as Prof. N. 
Schmidt 24 and others think, he never claimed 
to be a Messiah at all, the reason for putting 
him to death grows even more obscure. Did 
he court death, as afterwards the martyrs did 
in his name? We should hope not. Why 
then did he not make some simple and dignified 
answer in the palace of the High Priest to re- 
lieve him, as well as his enemies, of the mis- 
taken ideas of his message and purpose ? Why 

23 Matt. xvi. 21 ; Luke xix. 31, etc. 

24 The Prophet of Nazareth. 



28 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

did he not put up a word to save their souls 
from the oncoming crime of murder ? For his 
silence in such a situation must have been al- 
most a fresh provocation to anger. Is it even 
possible that he uttered the stinging words in 
Mark xiv. 62 about the coming day of judg- 
ment when his enemies should see him riding 
in the clouds? 

If you say, as we probably must, that we 
have no accurate account of the trial, the ques- 
tion still presses : — Why did the man of good- 
will, the man of the beatitudes and the Golden 
Rule, make such bitter and stubborn enemies 
as to suffer a judicial murder at their hands? 
Was their hatred related to the story of his 
conduct toward the money-changers in the tem- 
ple, and to an habitual denunciation of the lead- 
ers and teachers of his people? We cannot 
help being troubled by this question. We do 
not ask a high-minded man to be eager to save 
his own life. We do ask consideration not to 
let men blindly commit a cruel crime. Some- 
thing known as "the spirit of Jesus" has taught 
us a certain sympathy with the stupid, mis- 
guided, excited humanity, which by some fatal 



THE REAL MAN IN TWO ASPECTS 29 

misapprehension had been stirred to enmity 
against a friendly man. 

The point that I want to bring out is that 
the story is told in all the Gospels upon the dis- 
tinct messianic presupposition, that it was nec- 
essary, and that Jesus knew it was necessary, 
to meet a violent death. His will apparently 
was to die. This leaves us with a grave prob- 
lem of conduct, or else in a state of bewilder- 
ment as to the accuracy of our knowledge of 
the facts of his end. 

It is evident by this time that no one can 
make anything but a vague and merely conjec- 
tural narrative of the life of Jesus. The 
points of our information are not near enough 
together to light up a continuous pathway. 
Asking simply what the facts are, we may 
summarize what we know with fair probability 
as follows : Jesus was born a little before the 
assumed date of i A. D. in the little town of 
Nazareth in Galilee. His father was Joseph, 
a carpenter, and his mother was Mary. He 
was the eldest of a family of several children 
and he was brought up to his father's trade. 
He seems to have had some teaching in the 



30 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

Jewish Scriptures such as may have been pro- 
vided in the synagogue. He knew at least 
something of the Psalms and the prophecy of 
Isaiah. The period was one of unusual sus- 
ceptibility to religious interest throughout the 
Roman Empire. In Judea a notable man of 
the prophetic type, John the Baptist, proclaimed 
a popular revival of simple and ethical reli- 
gion. Jesus' mind was stirred by this move- 
ment. How he prepared himself for his char- 
acteristic work, whether he spent a period in 
the life of the desert, whether he had been 
touched at all by the ideas of the puritan and 
ascetic sect of the Essenes, whether he had per- 
sonal acquaintance with John, we may not say. 
He had certainly got at the heart of the reli- 
gion of his remarkable race. It was his habit 
to retire to the wilderness for rest and refresh- 
ment and mystical communion. 

He was a grown man of thirty years old, it 
is said, when he began his public life. He 
appeared first as a teacher in his own region of 
Galilee, with the town of Capernaum upon the 
Lake as the center of his journeyings. He 
made friends and disciples among the fisher- 



THE REAL MAN IN TWO ASPECTS 3 1 

men and others of similar social position. He 
taught wherever he found people, sometimes 
using the democratic freedom of the syna- 
gogue, sometimes gathering hearers by the 
shore of the Lake or in the open country. We 
follow him in one journey as far as the coast 
of the Mediterranean in the region of Tyre. 
How often he had been to Jerusalem before 
the last fatal visit we do not know, nor how 
far he had ever made friends in the capital. 
Wherever he went disciples seem to have at- 
tended him. . He taught with authority; that 
is, with the sense of the reality of his message. 
Jesus was not merely a prophet of the righteous 
life or a teacher of a simple religion. He was 
reported to be a wonderful healer. People 
followed him with their sick. It was believed 
that by laying his hands upon them, or even by 
a word, he could effect a cure. He began his 
mission, however, with a singular unwilling- 
ness to be known publicly, least of all as a 
worker of miracles. 25 As the short period of 

25 The impression from the Synoptic Gospels is in marked 
contrast to the account in the Fourth Gospel in which Jesus 
works miracles, not so much out of compassion as in order 
to command men's belief in him, 



32 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

his public life drew to a close, he put aside the 
earlier habit of diffidence and assumed the posi- 
tion of a leader. 

Jesus' unconventional habits of life, his free 
intercourse with the poor and despised classes, 
and his open sympathy with them, his frank 
moral judgments, and in all probability a cer- 
tain aggressiveness of tone, a growing use of 
the weapons of denunciation and a claim to a 
certain official superiority as a unique messen- 
ger of God, antagonized men and specially the 
ruling class, who resented his treatment of 
them and their manner of life. He appears to 
have expected a collision with the authorities. 
Something of popular demonstration in his 
favor in his last visit to Jerusalem, together 
with a disturbance in the temple area when 
Jesus assailed the business of the venders 
there, seems to have brought the opposition 
against him to a head. In some sense, easily 
misunderstood, he was believed to have claimed 
to be the expected deliverer or Messiah of his 
people. The charge finally written over the 
cross, "The king of the Jews/' represents this 
idea. With jealousy on the part of the priests 



THE REAL MAN IN TWO ASPECTS 33 

and others whom he had angered, and no great 
reluctance on the part of the Roman Governor 
to get rid of a possible exciter of the people, he 
was speedily condemned to the death of a mal- 
efactor. His friends all deserted him. 

In the whole narrative about Jesus, there is 
nothing, aside from the implication of the won- 
der-stories (which are no more wonderful than 
those related in Exodus and the Books of the 
Kings) that would lift him into a lonely 
uniqueness above the class of other illustrious 
prophets or teachers of religion. The claim 
for any absolute perfectness of character, other 
than the ever admirable greatness of a high 
and single purpose, is a quite gratuitous as- 
sumption. It does not proceed from the record, 
but from dogmatic prepossessions that grew 
up afterwards. The fact remains that we can 
know extremely little of the details of Jesus' 
life. 



Ill 

TWO KINDS OF TEACHING 

The chief mode of approach to the person- 
ality of Jesus has always been, and must re- 
main through his teachings. Would that we 
certainly knew which, and which only, are his 
own ! We begin at once with certain immortal 
passages, all of which together, like so much 
precious gold, may be comprised within a very 
brief compass. 1 We have, thus, the beatitudes, 
the most impressive and far-reaching of all 
spiritual truth, gathered largely out of the 
scattered veins of the Old Testament ore, and 
here fitted as it were into a coronet. I have 
already raised the question who first put these 
great verses together. The same question 
arises as to the whole structure of the so-called 
Sermon on the Mount, as contained in Mat- 

1 There are about fifty verses in Mark that may be fairly 
called notable or universal teachings. Adding similar ma- 
terial found in Matthew and in Luke we may estimate the 
amount of this high quality at about two hundred and twenty- 
five verses, or four to five chapters. 

34 



TWO KINDS OF TEACHING 35 

thew. 2 We can hardly think it possible that all 
this most solid of ethical teaching was given 
by Jesus in a single block, either to his un- 
learned disciples, hardly able yet to unravel 
the parables, or much less to a multitude of 
people, in a single sitting. We have here, 
however, doubtless the greatest and most 
characteristic ideas of Jesus; about the chief 
end of man's life, about the relations of broth- 
erhood, about forgiveness, about purity; about 
oaths and vows, about non-resistance; about 
alms-giving, fasting and prayer ; about the true 
treasure; against anxiety, against harsh or 
hasty judgment, or perhaps even any judg- 
ment of one's fellows ; about the test of charac- 
ter by its acts; about doing the good will of 
God as compared with saying the good words. 
The culminating sentences of the whole collec- 
tion are not at the end of the section, but at 
the close of the fifth chapter of Matthew, 
where Jesus likens the divine goodness to the 
constancy of the sunshine, and lays down the 
rule that man's goodness or good will ought 

2 It is noticeable that the form is quite different and much 
more quotable than the similar material in Luke. Compare 
the Beatitudes with Luke vi. 20, etc. 



36 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

normally to be like God's, equally all around 
and constant to all men. There is no teaching 
higher than this. One wonders if he who first 
uttered it could possibly have realized how 
profound and far-reaching this is. Why 
should we insist upon thinking this? 

Jesus is sometimes credited with original 
teaching about the Fatherhood of God. He 
certainly seems to have taken up, and adopted 
and realized this idea. Of course it was run- 
ning in the thought of his people. 3 It was not 
an uncommon idea among early peoples who 
often assumed that men were sons of the gods. 
The sentences known as the Lord's Prayer 
bring this idea into prominence, and what is 
more, into familiar use. We are obliged even 
here, however, to notice the mixture of 
thought. It is a father up in heaven, a father 
who tempts his children, a father set over 
against "the evil one." The substance of the 
prayer is in the words "Thy kingdom come. 
Thy will be done." 4 

Outside of the Sermon on the Mount, the 

3 See I Chron. xxix. 10; Isa. vi. 16; Mai. ii. 10. 

4 See the prayer in the revised version. 



TWO KINDS OF TEACHING 37 

greatest positive teachings of Jesus may be 
briefly summarized as follows: First and most 
important of all, is the Parable of the Good 
Samaritan. 5 The great law of universal love, 
already taught in the Old Testament, but al- 
most buried under the mass of priestly cere- 
monies, ritual and ecclesiasticism, needed clear 
illustration which this parable very beautifully 
furnishes. Perhaps the beauty of Jesus' story 
is not so much that the conduct is new or 
strange, as that it is told of a despised and 
alien class. It is as if a story of heroism were 
told to white men of a negro or a Chinaman. 
The next great parable is the story of the 
Prodigal Son. 6 This parable has always made 
an appeal to the imagination of the world. It 
is the everlasting justification of the lover of 
the outcast and the fallen. It is a story of the 
absolute radicalism of the law of forgiveness. 
No atonement — no sacrifice is here called for. 
The single essential requirement is that the 
wrong-doer shall repent and return to his duty. 

5 Luke x. It is curious, that the early memorabilia of 
Mark do not contain this story. 

6 Luke xv. 



38 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

The parables of the kingdom of heaven 7 
form a cluster by themselves. They would 
seem to be Jesus' own words, if anything is. 
The interest in them to modern minds is the 
rather remarkable suggestion of the doctrine 
of quiet development or growth, whether of 
the individual character, or of social and 
human betterment. This goes with the famil- 
iar words, "The kingdom of God is within 
you," or shall we say, "among you," or 
"here" ? s This doctrine, taken by itself, is 
very fine gold, but as we have presently to see, 
it is involved with much alien material. In- 
deed, the passage in Luke that follows these 
striking verses is one of the most tremendous 
warnings of how out of a quiet appearance the 
day of doom may suddenly sound. 

"He that findeth his life shall lose it and he 
that loseth his life for my sake shall find it," 9 
carries the memorable hint of a great law, 
namely "To die to live." It goes with the 
splendid verse quoted by Paul in Acts as from 

7 Matthew xiii. ; Mark iv. 

8 Note also, 'The kingdom of God cometh not with ob- 
servation." Luke xvii. 20, 21. 

9 Matthew x. 39. 



TWO KINDS OF TEACHING 39 

Jesus, "It is more blessed to give than to re- 
ceive." 10 That is, life is not in mere getting 
but in outgo and expression. "Whosoever will 
be great among you, let him be your minis- 
ter" n is the same teaching. There is nothing 
greater. The familiar and tender text, 
"Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy 
laden" 12 deserves mention here. It is to be 
observed however that it probably fits in with 
the Messianic passages, and stands or falls 
according to our interpretation of them. 

Memorable and characteristic is Jesus' 
teaching about the Sabbath. 13 In short, all 
forms and rules are for man. Likewise, his 
teaching about things clean and unclean, 14 
"That which cometh out of the mouth, this 
defileth a man." 

Closest to Jesus' heart and oftenest re- 
peated seems to have been the doctrine of for- 
giveness. "I say not until seven times, but 
until seventy times seven." 15 Strangely 

10 Acts xx. 35. 

11 Matthew xx. 26 to 28. 

12 Matthew xi. 28 to 30. 

13 Matthew xii. 1 to 14. 

14 Matthew xv. II. 

15 Matthew xviii. 22. 



40 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

enough, however, Jesus seems to threaten, in 
the parable of the two servants which follows, 
that God himself may not always forgive, as a 
man ought, but being wroth, will turn over the 
unforgiving man to the tormentors for ever! 

The grand law, "Thou shalt love the Lord 
thy God, and thy neighbor as thyself," 1G is 
given us very interestingly in Luke x. 25 as 
from the mouth of the questioner, as if indeed 
it were already in the common teaching of 
Jesus' people. It draws of course from ear- 
lier prophetic traditions, as, for example, from 
the beautiful teaching of Jonah. 17 

The parable of the Pharisee and the Publi- 
can praying in the temple 18 is a plain object 
lesson of Jesus' constant teaching against ar- 
rogance and pretense. We find here the key 
note of his life, recurring like a refrain. It is 
the Old Testament idea, "Everv one that ex- 
alteth himself shall be abased and he that 
humbleth himself shall be exalted.'' Another 
of Jesus' mottoes, prominent in the Lord's 

16 Matt. xxii. 37. 

17 See the remarkable passages in Lev. xix. 10, 15, 17, 18, 

34- 

18 Luke xviii. 9, etc. 



TWO KINDS OF TEACHING 41 

Prayer and emphasized in the story of Geth- 
semane is the word, "Not as I will, but as thou 
wilt/' 19 The words, though lacking in the 
other Gospels, attributed here to Jesus, 
"Father forgive them, for they know not what 
they do," 20 seem to set the crown upon our 
highest idea of Jesus. 

We have already observed that, beautiful as 
the highest teachings of Jesus are, they are 
not to be supposed to stand as the only sum- 
mits of ancient thought. Not to speak of other 
writings, there are passages as grand in the 
Old Testament, for example, the words from 
Micah, "What doth the Lord require of thee 
but to deal justly, to love mercy and to walk 
humbly with thy God." 21 The splendid pas- 
sage from the Wisdom of Solomon 22 about the 
heavenly wisdom also occurs to our minds, 
which "in all ages entering into holy souls 
maketh them friends of God and prophets." 
Also "For thou lovest all the things that are 
and abhorrest nothing which thou hast made. 23 

19 Matthew xxvi. 39. 

20 Luke xxiii. 34. 

21 Micah vi. 8. 

22 Chapter vii. 

23 Wisdom xi. 24. 



42 WHAT WE KX0W ABOUT JESUS 

The great teaching from i Corinthians xiii, 
about love, is quite as wonderful as anything 
in the Gospels. There are also certain re- 
markable verses about love in the Johannine 
writings: "Every one that loveth is born of 
God, and knoweth God." 24 

One might gladly wish that Jesus' teach- 
ings matched throughout with the remarkable 
and universal passages which we have already 
cited. But our study, if candid, must now pro- 
ceed to take account of a large number of pas- 
sages, greater far in volume than all which we 
have instanced, which stir anew very difficult 
questions touching Jesus' personality and doc- 
trine. 25 

Take first, the text "He that shall blaspheme 
against the Holy Ghost hath never forgive- 
ness, but is in danger of eternal damnation.' 

24 I John iv. 7. 

-" We find in the Synoptic Gospel, besides the two hundred 
verses or more of greater teachings already referred to, per- 
haps four hundred verses or the amount of eight chapters, 
which must be classed as of distinctly lower, and some of it 
even dubious worth. Such is the considerable volume of 
eschatological teaching, as in Matt, xxiv., and the passages 
touching demonology. Some of this material, perhaps a third 
of it. or as much as three chapters, presents real ethical diffi- 
culty to the modern mind. 

26 Mark iii. 28, 29. 



TWO KINDS OF TEACHING 43 

Even Professor Schmidt in The Prophet of 
Nazareth, free as he is in discarding many of 
Jesus' supposed sayings, leaves this as a gen- 
uine and characteristic utterance. But perhaps 
no word of Jesus has carried more terror, or 
imposed heavier suffering upon tender con- 
sciences. It constitutes almost a radical denial 
of Jesus' own doctrine of forgiveness. Here 
is "a sin unto death," not clearly described, 
which the Almighty will not bear with. God 
is not so good then, as man ought to be! 

This is not a random teaching of Jesus. It 
runs through the warp and woof of the New 
Testament. In Jesus' common thought the 
world, so far from being a universe, is a 
theater of divided powers, a scheme of dualism. 
There is heaven above and angels ; there is hell 
below and devils. There are men like "the 
good seed," "the good ground," the good fish 
caught in the net; the good sheep. There are 
also bad men, as if by nature, like the tares in 
the wheat, the bad fish, the evil ground, the 
goats on the left hand at the judgment seat. 
There is a constant doctrine of opposition in 
the New Testament. Jesus loves the poor and 



44 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

oppressed. Does he love the Pharisees? It 
would seem not. But why not ? This doctrine 
of antagonism perhaps will prove to account 
for the mode of Jesus' death. Toward a con- 
siderable class of his fellows, he never shows 
a touch of that graciousness and kindly for- 
bearance which he inculcates among his own 
disciples toward one another. Is not this so? 
Look at some of the evidences of this fact. 
Thus Jesus likens the towns which reject him 
to Sodom and Gomorrah, and threatens them 
with the same fate. 27 His teaching of hell and 
torment is as clear, full and tremendous as any 
hyper-Calvinistic divine could have made it. 28 
His teachings have been the inexhaustible ar- 
senal from which passionate men have drawn 
their material for the inhuman and unbearable 
doctrine of eternal punishment. The faith of 
"Universalism" has its severest blows from the 
mouth of Jesus. 

This type of teaching is just as conspicuous 
in the group of parables concerning the king- 
dom of heaven as anywhere else. 29 The tares 

27 Matthew x. 14, etc. 

28 Matthew xviii. 8, etc. ; xxiii. 33. 

29 Matt. xiii. 



TWO KINDS OF TEACHING 45 

are burnt in the fire. "There shall be wailing 
and gnashing of teeth." This is the repeated 
refrain. Moreover, it goes with the thought 
of the parables. Recall also the refrain: 
"Where the worm dieth not and the fire is not 
quenched." 30 

Do you try to urge that these numerous 
teachings were added by another hand ? Even 
if this were possible, the fact remains that 
Jesus' disciples never understood him as put- 
ting aside or doubting the current popular 
ideas about the next life, the judgment of the 
world, and the overwhelming fate of the mass 
of human kind. "Are there few that be 
saved?" they enquire. And Jesus says, "Wide 
is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to 
destruction and many there be which go in 
thereat." 31 Speaking of the case of the relapse 
of a man from whom an evil spirit had been 
expelled Jesus explains that "seven other 
spirits more wicked" than the first have en- 
tered the man. "Even so," he adds signifi- 
cantly, "Shall it be unto this wicked genera- 

30 Mark ix. 44, 46, 48. 

31 Matt. vii. 13. 



46 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

tion." 32 He teaches in parables. Why? Not, 
as you would suppose, in order to help people 
understand, but he is made to quote by way of 
answer to this question a tremendous passage 
from Isaiah, "Because they seeing see not, and 
hearing they hear not, neither do they under- 
stand." 33 Jesus warns even his disciples to 
"enter into life halt, or maimed, or blind, rather 
than to be cast with two hands or feet into 
everlasting fire." 34 

I have mentioned three noble parables out of 
nearly thirty. The fact is, if you remove these 
three, the parable of the sower, the short ones 
about the kingdom of heaven, the beautiful lit- 
tle parable of the lost sheep, and the story of 
the Pharisee and the Publican in the Temple, 
you will have left indeed considerable interest- 
ing and suggestive matter, but you will have 
exhausted pretty nearly all high ethical and 
spiritual value from the parables. 

32 Matt. xii. 45. 

33 Matt. xiii. 15. 

34 Matt, xviii. 6, etc. Luke is especially full of teachings 
quite as hard for the conscience, as the wonder-stories of the 
Bible are difficult for the reason. Luke iv. 24-28; vi. 23-27; 
x. 11-17; xi. 29-33, 46-53; xii. 9, 10, 46-49, 51-54; xiii. 2-10, 
24-31; xiv. 21-27; xvi. 23-31; xvii. 26-37; xix. 22-28; xx, 
9-19 ; xxi. 34-37. 



TWO KINDS OF TEACHING 47 

Take, for example, the rich man and Laz- 
arus. 35 There is no clear moral teaching here. 
The poor man goes to Abraham's bosom ap- 
parently only because he has been poor, not 
because he has been holy or patient. What a 
terrific picture of Dives in hell, where he can- 
not be forgiven or respited, even though his 
humanity is awakened to go and save his 
brethren ! The Wedding Feast, 36 the Wise and 
Foolish Virgins and the Talents, 37 picturesque 
as they are, are morally more or less vitiated 
for our use by the inhuman ending of each of 
them. They overshoot the ethical mark, and 
make the way of religion unlovely. 

The parable of the Sheep and the Goats like- 
wise blends splendid teaching, as to the true 
test of men's lives, with the awful and radically 
unjust idea of the spectacular judgment day, 
and the final separation of the bad and the 
good. 38 Do these unfortunate "goats," selfish 
and thoughtless as they have been, deserve 
eternal damnation, as if they were a caste 

35 Luke xvi. 

30 Matt, xxii and Luke xil 

37 Matt. xxv. 

38 Matt. xxv. 



48 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

apart from the rest of humanity? Neverthe- 
less, Jesus' mighty authority has been cited, 
and with overwhelming reasons, through 
nearly twenty Christian centuries for a mode 
of doctrine, touching our common human na- 
ture, which has helped to sanction almost every 
conceivable barbarity and torture. Did not 
God hate his enemies, as in the story of the 
Marriage Feast? Did he not turn over the 
guilty to torment? Did he not separate the 
bad from the good? If Jesus' word was ap- 
parently good for anything, it held good to 
support all this baleful eschatology. You can- 
not easily get rid of it and only save such ma- 
terial as pleases you, for example, the Sermon 
on the Mount. The same teaching is also ex- 
plicitly in the Sermon on the Mount. 39 

I am aware that many students believe that 
the long chapters, especially in Matthew, 
touching the end of the world and the last 
things, are a late addition to the Gospels. If 
this is so, Jesus surely never seems to have said 
a word to discourage these current ideas. You 
have also at once to suppose another author 

39 See Matt. v. 22, 29, 30 ; vii. 13, 14, 22, 23, etc. 



TWO KINDS OF TEACHING 49 

for a number of the parables. Grant, however, 
that a later hand is responsible for all this mo- 
mentous teaching. This teaching had without 
doubt a most powerful influence in the recep- 
tion and spread of the new religion. We are 
then confronted with another interesting prob- 
lem of authorship. It was no feeble hand that 
composed the tremendous chapters to which we 
refer and these grand and awful parables. 
This is the hand of a prophet. It would look 
now, contrary to the ordinary impression, but 
in line with all the analogies of history, as if 
we had not merely the figure of one man, Jesus, 
all alone, but a group of remarkable personali- 
ties — Paul, the anonymous author of the Jo- 
hannine writings, the author of the Epistle to 
the Hebrews, besides those who put the Synop- 
tic Gospels into shape. It may be true as Mat- 
thew Arnold has suggested, that Jesus w r as 
above the head of his disciples, but it begins 
now to look more as if the new religion must 
have owed its existence to a succession of great 
individualities, all of them worthy to be com- 
pared with the earlier prophets. 

The supposition, however, of unknown but 



50 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

powerful writers, who may have supplemented 
Jesus' teachings with more or less fresh ma- 
terial, leaves the figure of Jesus himself even 
more obscure and fragmentary. Where does 
the authentic teaching of Jesus leave off and 
these others begin ? Xo one knows or ever can 
know. How far was Jesus responsible for the 
more extreme and terrific doctrine, which was 
evidently in the air while he lived, and which 
he seems to have done nothing to controvert? 
It is evident that the point of view to which 
we have come, though it may at first seem dis- 
appointing, brings immediate compensation. 
The common idea of Jesus' unique personality, 
or perfectness of character, carries almost in- 
evitably a subtle respect for the authority of 
all his teaching and for every motion in his 
attitude. Even when modern men will not 
quote the Xew Testament doctrines, however 
explicit they are, about devils and hell, they 
still use Jesus's mighty example for treating 
their fellows with antagonism and denuncia- 
tion. 40 There has thus been a profound ethical 

40 In the recent report of a minister's farewell sermon he 
says : "We. all of us, forget what manner of man Jesus 
was." He goes on to say : "That same Jesus pronounced 



TWO KINDS OF TEACHING 5 1 

difficulty in the theory of Jesus' uniqueness 
from which we are now relieved. The fact is, 
that our highest spiritual ideal will not permit 
us to believe that the sanguinary words put 
into Jesus' mouth could proceed from a man 
wholly possessed with the spirit of God. We 
shall have occasion to refer to this fact again. 

upon the aristocracy of Jerusalem such woes as have never 
been matched in the world's language of doom. That same 
Jesus, finding the money changers in the temple, lashed the 
sordid crew out of the holy place and hurled their money 
after them. If a minister to-day following his Master should 
do any of these things, he would not only be pronounced 
uncharitable, but ungoverned in temper, possibly insane." 
We ask, would not this be a fair judgment upon such a min- 
ister? Unfortunately, this use of Jesus' words and example 
is too common, even with most estimable people. Did such 
use of Jesus' authority ever do any humane service or help 
to overcome evil? Is it not well to free men from the 
bondage of a theory which thus sets up antagonisms and 
alienates them from one another? 



IV 

THE QUESTION OF MESSIAHSHIP 

We have now to consider one of the most 
perplexing of all the questions about Jesus' 
personality. How far did he take himself to 
be in some sense or other the special messenger 
of God, a unique being, a Messiah, or anointed 
one, a King of kings, if not to rule the nations, 
yet at least their lord in a spiritual domain? 
Conflicting opinions rage over this point. On 
the one hand, the keynote of all the Gospels is 
doubtless the idea of Messiahship or Christ- 
ship, out of which the creeds of Christendom 
grew. On the other hand, it is now held that 
Jesus was quite or almost innocent of such 
teaching and that this idea grew up after his 
death. Professor Schmidt's new book, The 
Prophet of Nazareth, makes this contention 
the learned issue of his study. The term "son 
of man," he tells us, so far from having a 
unique and personal application to Jesus' 

52 



THE QUESTION OF MESSIAHSHIP 53 

office, is simply the Syriac term for man. Thus 
man, not Christ, is lord of the Sabbath. Not 
Jesus alone, but man then is come to seek and 
to save the lost? Shall man then preside at 
the judgment? * 

It seems to me most likely that the Messianic 
idea of Jesus grew up, doubtless with the help 
and suggestion of his disciples, from the seed 
of his original words. It is not easy at all 
otherwise to explain so numerous a group of 
passages ascribed to him. The origin and 
growth of the resurrection stories seem also 
more likely to have come with Jesus' help, by 
way of preparation for them, than without any 
such help. They also came, I surmise, along 
with a wave of interest and belief in occult and 
psychical phenomena, of which we get hints in 
the Gospels, as for example, in the story of 
Herod's theory of the reincarnation of John 
the Baptist in the person of Jesus, 2 in the story 
of Jesus walking on the sea, 3 in the legend of 
the transfiguration, 4 as well as in the ghostly 

1 Matt. xxv. 31. Compare xii. 32; xx. 18, 28; Mark viii. 
38; xiv. 21; Luke vii. 34; ix, 44; xii. 40; xviii. 8; xix. 10. 

2 Matt. xiv. 2. 

3 Matt. xiv. 

4 Matt. xvii. 



54 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

appearances in Jerusalem after Jesus' death. 5 
Would it not be far more likely that Jesus, the 
child of his age, might have shared in, and 
given occasional expression to ideas which 
were immediately in the air all ready to be 
uttered, than that he should have been free of 
such ideas — a modern man before his time? 
No one can easily explain his very frequent as- 
sumption of some species of unique and au- 
thoritative character, except by the quite nat- 
ural belief that he took himself to be — I will 
not urge more than a man, but a man appointed 
by God for a peculiar mission. 

This idea was congruous with the prophetic 
office, and specially with the passages which 
he loved to quote from the book of Isaiah. 
You certainly have to do violence to his lan- 
guage in order to dissociate the centrality of 
his own person from numerous passages. The 
more than prophetic "I" and "mine," while not 
so exaggerated as in the Fourth Gospel, yet 
run all through the Synoptic Gospels. The 
very words "Come unto me all ye that labor/' 

5 Matt. xxix. 52, 53. 

6 See Luke iv. 18. 



THE QUESTION OF MESSIAHSHIP 55 

emphasize this centrality of thought. He 
seems to call disciples to him and to be known 
as their Master. What does the verse about 
the bridegroom being taken away, after which 
his disciples will fast, mean ? 7 Why does he 
seem to say so much about "my sake" and "my 
name?" "Whosoever shall deny me will I also 
deny." 8 Why should the least in the kingdom 
of heaven be greater than John the Baptist ? 9 
The words "son of man" hardly make sense, if 
you always insist upon translating them to 
mean merely man. "The son of man came eat- 
ing and drinking and they say, 'Behold a friend 
of publicans and sinners.' " 10 Here is a very 
emphatic mode of saying "I," as apart from 
ordinary men. "He that soweth the good seed 
is the son of man." n This is another emphatic 
/. Why again does Jesus seem to put away his 
own family relations in favor of the wider re- 
lationship to his disciples ? 12 Shall we rule out 
altogether the tradition of the profound inter- 
est of people generally, of Herod, of John the 
Baptist, of Jesus' own disciples, especially of 

7 Mark ii. 18, etc 10 Matt. xi. 19. 

8 Matt. x. 33. " Matt. xiii. 37. 

9 Luke vii. 28. 12 Matt. xii. 50. 



56 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

Peter, 13 in speculating as to Jesus' office and 
claims ? Can we keep just what we like in the 
story of the interview between Jesus and Zebe- 
dee's sons 14 and suppose that nothing at all 
was said of a kingdom of glory, in which, after 
the impending crisis of sorrow, the disciples 
hoped to share? 

Again, why did the authorities put Jesus to 
death, if he claimed nothing beyond the gift of 
ordinary prophecy? What assumption of au- 
thority could have led to that extraordinary 
story of the cleansing of the temple? What 
else but the sense of Messiahship could have 
made him so silent beneath the questions at his 
trial? How shall we explain the alleged in- 
scription on the cross, "The king of the Jews ?" 

Jesus' singular unwillingness to be publicly 
known deserves attention here. If we can be- 
lieve the tradition, he habitually imposes silence 
about himself, at least in the early part of his 
ministry, on one and another of the sick whom 
he has treated. It may be said that this tallies 
with the sentences which urge the doctrine of a 

13 Matt. xvi. 13, etc. 

14 Mark x. 35, etc. 



"THE QUESTION OF MESSIAHSHIP 57 

quiet coming of the kingdom, without violence 
and observation, as we to-day think it comes. 
I raise the question whether these verses do 
not all lend themselves to a different interpre- 
tation? One of the great motives of Jesus' 
life seems to have been the beatitude, "Blessed 
are the Meek." The law of the world, he 
teaches, is that the mighty shall be brought 
down and the lowly exalted. He has accord- 
ingly an instinctive dread of being put forward 
and made a popular hero. The idea of a suf- 
fering type of leadership, taken from Isaiah, 
has impressed his mind. Through the gate of 
suffering, humiliation and even death lies the 
way of victory. None the less, but all the 
more, may he claim and expect final exaltation. 
The lowly shall be exalted. That is his creed. 
There is nothing inconsistent between this 
thought and the expectation of the coming of 
a "great and terrible day of the Lord," a day 
of retribution. This tremendous equalizing of 
accounts and rewards is indeed the fact to be 
looked for. The familiar text about the king- 
dom of God coming "not with observation" 
now tallies with this idea of the lowly Messiah, 



$8 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT ' JESUS 

who through the valley of humiliation is on his 
way to glory. 

Even we modern men are able to hold both 
ideas in solution at one and the same time; on 
one hand, the thought of a ceaseless law of evo- 
lution, the possibility also on the other hand of 
epochs of seemingly rapid and even revolu- 
tionary movement. Both ideas have truth in 
them and fall back on analogies in nature. We 
are inclined therefore to think that Jesus did 
distinctly, naturally and sincerely voice the ex- 
pectation of his age, looking toward some sort 
of a catastrophe and a miraculous renovation 
of social conditions. This seems altogether 
more likely than that he failed to share the 
common hopes of his oppressed and imagina- 
tive people in favor of an interposition of their 
God in their favor. He doubtless believed that 
he was the chosen leader in the way of the new 
hope. He spoke with an assumption of au- 
thority. He doubtless thought himself gifted 
to heal the sick and to drive out the demons. 
People rallied to him and responded to his 
treatment, carried away by the contagion of 
his own conviction and hope. All this is quite 



THE QUESTION OF MESSIAHSHIP 59 

in line with what we know of the psychic work- 
ing of human nature. 

It may be objected that this thought of Jesus 
makes him less simple than we had supposed. 
It gives a double aspect to his character. But 
it does not make him less human or natural. 
Let us use a familiar historical illustration — 
one of many that might be cited. It is the case 
of Savonarola, the great Florentine preacher 
and reformer. Perhaps no man of higher, 
nobler or more austere virtue and purpose ever 
lived. On one side, you have the pure gold of 
a great and constant devotion, true till death, 
a generous humanity, an overwhelming sense 
of common duties and practical ideals. On the 
other hand you see a man of prophetic visions, 
the child of the Middle Ages, ruled by the 
superstitions of his people, one day working 
with sane mind for reform through the sure 
development of the institutions of Florence, 
the next day confidently expecting the miracu- 
lous interposition of angels. At his best and 
noblest he preached the doctrine of love. All 
the same, and with no sense of incongruity, he 
denounced the rulers of his people and stirred 



60 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

the antagonism of men with his passion, subtly 
akin really to the passions of the men whom he 
denounced. 

A query arises here whether there may not 
lie in human nature, like tinder ready to be 
fired, an astonishing and almost infinite readi- 
ness, more than men are aware of, to be set 
apart, anointed and crowned as martyrs or 
leaders. Thus, the fishermen of the lake of 
Galilee are ready immediately to be princes in 
the new realm. Thus daily, ill-equipped Amer- 
ican citizens set themselves up for the highest 
offices. Thus, priests and ministers imagine 
themselves to be worthy of superior dignities 
and privileges and to deserve to live in palaces, 
or again to be given titles above other men. Is 
there not a sort of faculty of Messiahship latent 
in men? On its lower side it shows itself in 
the extraordinary egotism and conceit of quite 
mediocre men. On its best side, it is close to 
the infinite and divine element in humanity. 
"We know not what we shall be," inasmuch as 
we partake of the nature of God. The found- 
ers of religions and of sects have thus com- 
monly thought themselves to be appointed of 



THE QUESTION OF MESSIAH SHIP 6l 

God. The recent story of Babism is a good 
illustration of this fact. Other cases easily 
occur. For example, some may recall a man of 
very noble nature, a rather conspicuous figure 
among radical American thinkers in the last 
century, who refusing the name of Master to 
Jesus though at the cost of personal loss and 
suffering, yet fondly thought of himself as a 
sort of philosophic Messiah, whose teachings 
only needed to be followed by mankind to solve 
the doubts of the world! 

Suppose now a man of profound spiritual 
genius, such a man as Moses might have been, 
or a man of commanding personality, such as 
Daniel Webster was to his contemporaries. 
Bring him to birth centuries ago, in a land 
where God was thought to speak to man in the 
dreams of the night. Let him be born at a 
period when all sorts of wonderful ideas were 
dawning on the world. Possess him with the 
tradition of the prophets. Fill his soul with 
ardor for his oppressed people. Let him fast 
and pray in lonely mountains. Let him hear 
voices and dream dreams. Let him in imagi- 
nation fight battles with the arch-foe of souls. 



62 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

Lift him in insight above the people around 
him and let him hear their words of admiration 
at his splendid gifts. You have thus the nat- 
ural material for the idea of some sort of Mes- 
siahship. All the more the praise of Jesus that 
his thought took the form of the meek. 15 The 
more meek the man was, the higher the coining 
exaltation. This was at the heart of Jesus' 
doctrine. In his age, however, such meekness 
demanded a coming glory and victory to match 
it. Meekness was not inconsistent with the 
punishment and humiliation of his enemies. 
The more they triumphed in this world, the 
surer their doom would be in the next. This 
is the steady teaching of the New Testament. 
It seems to have been the thought of Jesus. If 
he knew better, alas, that he did not make the 
humane teaching plain ! If now and then he 
hit close to the mark of the universal doctrine 
of love, he seems never to have worked this 
doctrine out into its consistent application in 
detail. How could he have done so immense 
a task as that, in the face of the prepossessions 

15 See the parable about taking "the lowest room" at the 
feast. Luke xiv. 7, etc. 



THE QUESTION OF MESSIAHSHIP 63 

of his age and the demonology that haunted 
the world? As well expect Franklin to have 
worked out the theory of the newly found 
theory of electricity into the applications of 
Edison and Marconi. 

The fact is, in taking account of Jesus' life 
and person, we can never afford to leave his 
theology out of our sight. It looks as if his 
God was thought of as literally a "person," in 
the narrower sense of the word, seated some- 
where in heaven and ruling the world through 
the offices of his angels. Did Jesus ever any- 
where clearly state the wonderful doctrine of 
the Fourth Gospel, "God is Spirit?" Never 
does he give a word of release from the almost 
Persian conception of the divided world and 
the Satanic kingdom. His faith is that God 
will at last triumph over the devil. Here is 
the naive basis of a theology altogether differ- 
ent from what modern men can believe. The 
natural underlying practical conclusion is the 
final separation of the evil from the good. 
This idea has been the gloomy burden of the 
theology of Christendom. It had been woven 
into the warp and woof of the traditional 



64 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

Christianity. Jesus' great name is still used 
to sanction it. 

We have already seen that we may never ex- 
pect to recover a veritable likeness of Jesus. 
We have not the necessary authentic material. 
But more than that, the idea of Messiahship is 
inextricably in our way. It is not only wrought 
into the narrative. It is apparently also in the 
mind of Jesus. It was inevitable to his age. 
But it does not fit into the framework of our 
modern thought. It has become unhelpful 
ethically. The Messiah has the lineaments of 
a man, not the character of the God whom we 
worship. It is a Messiah who was mistaken, 
as for instance, in his prophecies of the end of 
the world. 16 The world is coming to learn the 
use of a greater word than the "I" of a Mes- 
siah. The noblest of leaders may not safely 
dwell on the centrality of his own person. The 
more modest words "we" and "ours" alone 
keep men safe and in orderly place in the ranks 
of the common humanity. No one may assume 
a sole authority over his fellows. 

What then, you ask, shall we make of the 

16 See Matt. xvi. 28. 



THE QUESTION OF MESSIAHSHIP 65 

actual Jesus? We catch the suggestion of a 
grand and impressive figure, after the fashion 
of an Elijah or Isaiah, intense, passionate, de- 
voted, prodigal of life, absolutely willing to go 
wherever the vision or the divine voice bids. 
He is a great lover and equally a strong hater. 
He is possessed with a sense of a supernatural 
mission which he must needs die to fulfil. He 
is sustained with a sense of coming victory, 
of death leading to life. He has caught the 
idea that the suffering of the good is a sort of 
price paid, as it really is, for the renewal of 
the life of the world. He believes that, in some 
peculiar sense, he is set apart to pay that kind 
of price. Passages from his favorite prophet 
sway his mind to this thought. More and 
more, as he approaches the end of his brief 
career, he is lifted, as many another prophet 
has been, with this overmastering sense of the 
exaltation of his office. There blends there- 
fore with the touches of the common and genial 
humanity, an almost repellant impression of 
aloofness, as of one already the inhabitant of 
another and mystic realm. On this side Jesus 
is well-nigh unapproachable. Normal human 



66 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

life is apart from this realm. It is the region 
of fanaticism and all religious extravagance. 
The characteristic of the earlier phases of re- 
ligious experiences, such as William James has 
related, is a vein of what seems to us modern 
men morbid and shadowy. The characteristic 
of modern religious experience is that it seeks 
the sunlight, and must be at one with bodily 
health and sanity. 

I am aware that others may find or create a 
very different picture of Jesus. It is easy to 
see only what pleases one. It is easy to imagine 
a lovable and gentle man, free of every Hebrew 
feature, in fact the best type of the present-day 
clergyman, affable, and tactful, a favorite at 
dinner parties. Is it at all certain the actual 
Jesus would be persona grata in the average 
home of the well-to-do citizen who prays in 
Jesus' name, more than he was in Pharisees' 
houses two thousand years ago? Recall his 
stern criticism of men's social and religious 
conventionalities. 17 How many people enjoy 

17 Read the story of Jesus in Simon's house, Luke vii. 36, 
etc. 



THE QUESTION OF MESSIAHSHIP 67 

meeting a genuine man who will tell them ex- 
actly what he thinks ! 

There is a common use of Jesus' life and 
character which deserves a word of considera- 
tion. I mean the complete idealization of 
Jesus, especially under the name of "Christ." 
Men tell us that they do not care who Jesus 
was "after the flesh," as Paul says, in view of 
their ideal of the perfect type of humanity. 
They therefore worship Christ, now become 
another more human, intimate and personal 
name for the idea of God present in human life. 
Men make under this name a beautiful and glo- 
rified conception of a human life, high enough 
to be called one with God. This is the Christo- 
centric religion of "progressive orthodoxy." 

Many go further than this. They report 
that they have had profound spiritual experi- 
ences of communion with "The Risen Christ." 
We do not deny the fact of a spiritual experi- 
ence. We merely suggest that the name which 
it bears is the least essential part of it. Under 
all forms and many names men have had a 
sense of peace, gladness, a companionship too 



68 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

high for words, and some kind of divine guid- 
ance. This is the central fact of religion. 
The validity of the experience evidently does 
not depend upon the name or the symbol used, 
or any particular image suggested in the mind. 
James Martineau who says "God," is as well 
served as Dr. Lyman Abbott, the favorite name 
of whose God seems to be "Christ." The man 
who sees no visions and has no dreams may 
rest in the thought of a divine universe in 
which all is well. 

One may admit that this symbolism, like its 
kindred Mariolatry, is helpful and ennobling. 
But it is not and cannot be an acquaintance 
with, or an appreciation of the actual Jesus. 
Men who worship the Christ of their imagina- 
tion as God certainly touch Jesus no more 
closely than the worshipers of Mary touch the 
actual mother of Jesus. The story of Jesus 
indeed suggests certain noble features which 
go to make up the imaginative conception of 
the ideal man. This process of idealization 
is like an artist's sketch in which one might 
not even recognize the actual forest and stream 
from which it has been suggested. Like the 



THE QUESTION OF MESSIAHSHIP 69 

picture, it is the work of the artistic or poetic 
faculty. It is not even necessary for the wor- 
shiper of Jesus as the ideal Christ to know him 
at all. It is like the worship of Mary, which 
may be ardent and uplifting, though no one 
knows anything about her. The difficulty of 
this use of the conception of Christ is that men 
confuse their ideal with bits of the ancient 
story. Their Christ, so far from being the 
highest ideal which they can conceive, is the 
man who called down woes upon his enemies. 
Such idealization perpetuates the spirit of en- 
mity in the world. 



V 

JESUS AS THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTIANITY 

The conventional questions may now be 
asked. How can the rise and history of Chris- 
tianity be accounted for in any other way than 
upon the presupposition of a unique founder? 
For the most progressive nations are to-day 
accounted Christian. The Christian religion 
under some one of its forms is still winning 
converts. This seems at first a very formi- 
dable question, but the answer is much plainer 
than it is often made to appear. It grows out 
of a mass of familiar knowledge about the rise 
and development of religions. 

In the first place there seems to be no ground 
to believe that the actual Jesus, even in the role 
of Messiah, ever intended to found a new re- 
ligion. The old religion at its best was good 
enough for him. It was a religion of justice, 
mercy, peace, reverence. This was all that 
Jesus preached. It only needed to be freed 

70 



JESUS AS THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTIANITY Jl 

from its tribal narrowness and its vexatious de- 
tails of ceremony in order to become a religion 
good enough for all men. The spirit of a 
broader humanity was already in the air. If 
Paul had really known the religion of his own 
people, as taught in the sixth chapter of Micah, 
it is hard to see to what else he would have 
needed to be converted. It is certain that with 
such a religion he could never have been a per- 
secutor, much less an enemy of Jesus ! Of all 
the denominations in Christendom the Quakers 
seem to have been nearest to Jesus' thought. 
If one fact is sure, it is that Jesus never 
founded the elaborate congeries of systems his- 
torically known as "Christianity." It is pre- 
posterous to suppose that he would have under- 
stood the claims, the colossal machinery and 
the magnificent pomp of the Roman Catholic 
and other sacerdotal churches. 

As to the rise and development of Chris- 
tianity, two quite different theories appear. 
One is that the mighty stream of Christian 
history is traceable back substantially to a sin- 
gle fountain or source, namely, the life and 
teaching of Jesus, as men may once have 



J2 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

guessed that the mysterious Nile had a single 
source. This idea seems to be out of line with 
all the analogies of history and of human life. 
The other thought is that the great stream 
flows from innumerable sources, with contribu- 
ting fountains in every land and from every pe- 
riod of history, with daily accretions to-day, as 
if from the constant rain and the dew. The 
stream of religion flowed before Jesus was. A 
long line of unknown psalmists and lovers of 
righteousness fed the strong spring of his life, 
as from underground sources. A noble group 
of men, close to him and following him, each 
added the momentum of their lives to the new 
flow of the current. At this point the stream 
took Jesus' official name, as the continent of 
America took the name of Americus Vespucci, 
or might better have taken the name of Colum- 
bus, without the slightest word of disparage- 
ment of other brave and great voyagers who 
under a common inspiration sailed the same 
seas. The analogy between the founding of 
Christianity and the discovery of America is 
very suggestive. We have the same analogy 
in the history of every invention. No person 



JESUS AS THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTIANITY 73 

ever accomplishes anything alone. No one 
can be given the sole credit for any attain- 
ment. 

The truth is, that the early Christianity obvi- 
ously owed its success very largely to the inde- 
fatigable labors of Paul, whose genius took it 
out of the lines of a Jewish sect and gave it a 
quasi universal character. As Jesus founded 
no new religion, so he wrote no books and pro- 
fessed to bring no new doctrine. There is no 
certainty that he appointed apostles, least of all 
twelve in number. Suppose that he had merely 
emphasized the Fatherhood of God and the 
brotherhood of man, though in the clearest 
manner. Does any one imagine that a new 
religion could have been established and made 
to endure on this simple basis, in the age of 
Nero and in the face of Gothic invasions? 

The primitive Christianity was involved 
with certain very natural, and fascinating 
ideas, lying close to the borderland of error, 
which, like alloy mixed with the gold, gave it 
common currency. One of these ideas, akin 
to the belief of modern spiritualists, was the 
bodily or physical resurrection of Jesus. This 



74 WHAT WE KXOW ABOUT JESUS 

appealed tremendously, as such a notion always 
does appeal, to the popular imagination. This 
was the burden of Paul's preaching, though 
he seems for himself not to have credited a 
physical resurrection so much as the repeated 
appearance of Jesus in his "spiritual body." 1 

The early Church also seems to have looked 
for the miraculous coming of their Lord from 
heaven to judge the world. 2 This was an idea 
to conjure with and to make converts. The 
grand expectation in the early Church that 
supernatural events were about to spring forth 
made such a book as the Apocalypse possible. 

Again, the early Christianity, just like Chris- 
tian Science to-day, was a vigorous health cult, 
all the more persuasive from the common de- 
lusion that devils were the cause of disease. 
The Christian healer, at the magic name of 
Jesus, could cast out the devils, and cure the 
sick. Imagine this idea removed from the 
early Christianity, and try to think what would 
have been the collapse of faith. These three 
great ideas, like so many strong strands, helped 

1 I Cor. xv. 44. 

2 See I Thess. vi. 14, etc. 



JESUS AS THE FOUNDER OF CHRISTIANITY 75 

mightily to hold Christians together, till the 
new religion came to be fortified with the 
priest-craft, the pomp and power of imperial 
Rome. Then it largely ceased to be Jesus' 
religion at all. 

The development of Christianity from the 
working of natural means and the play of 
human motives, allies it with the rise of other 
great cults. Thus, while the Buddha gave a 
name to Buddhism, he certainly did not create 
the religion. But he served as an intermediary 
to give a new and popular turn to the prevail- 
ing religion of his people. A religion is al- 
ways greater than its founder. Otherwise we 
should have to assume needless dignity for the 
authors of various modern cults. We have 
spoken of the Madonna worship. But no one 
outside of the Catholic Church thinks it neces- 
sary, in order to explain the origin of the wor- 
ship, to suppose that Mary was better than 
other mothers. It is interesting to recall that 
in Paul's case, he seems not to have known 
Jesus "after the flesh," that is, the actual Jesus. 
His Jesus was an ideal person and all the more 
powerful. The relation of the founders of a 



j6 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

great religion to the course of its growth is 
like that of the founders of a nation or a 
dynasty. We gladly owe our thanks to King 
Alfred and Washington, but we owe our 
thanks to many another good patriot as well, 
without whose help we could never have heard 
of Alfred or Washington. 



VI 

CERTAIN POSITIVE CONCLUSIONS 

It may be that the old word will be uttered 
again, at least in some form: "They have 
taken away my Lord." If we can never be 
sure what the actual Jesus was like, what be- 
comes, you ask, of the "leadership of Jesus"? 
We answer, in the very words attributed to 
Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, and which contain 
a world of wise suggestion: "It is expedient 
for you that I go away." It is another in- 
stance of the familiar case where the vase that 
bore the exquisite perfume must be broken in 
order to use the perfume. The letter must go 
that the spirit may prevail. 

To be perfectly frank, as we are bound to be 
by every consideration of honesty as w T ell as 
religion, the actual and historical man Jesus 
is not, and has long since ceased to be, the one 
leader or Master in religious life, or in the 
progress of mankind. He is not the real au- 

77 



78 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

thority of the modern man in any church, 
either for conduct or religion. 

Let us face this fact seriously, for it is very 
important. In the first place, the ideal man 
whom we modern people demand as the pat- 
tern of our lives, is not, as we have seen, the 
Jesus of the Gospels. It is indeed a different 
ideal for every man and woman. But for us 
Americans, it must be modern and American. 
Jesus was a Jew, unmarried, the father of no 
children, apparently somewhat skeptical of the 
marriage relation, 1 as Paul was. He was not 
a citizen but only a subject of the empire; he 
was not a man of affairs; he had nothing to 
do with art; he was the example of a Hebraic 
type, in contrast to the generous Greek type of 
life, or the vigorous Norse type. The dom- 
inant thought of the cross and the resurrec- 
tion puts him somewhat away from the normal 
healthy-minded youth and man. Our actual 
ideal, on the contrary, is of a patriot, a husband 
and father, a man of affairs, a man of the 
world, in the highest sense of the word, whose 
business it is, not so much to die bravely as to 

1 Matt. xix. 10-12. 



CERTAIN POSITIVE CONCLUSIONS 79 

live nobly, while fearless of death. Our ideal 
embraces both the Hebraic and the Classic type 
in a larger pattern than either. This is a dif- 
ferent ideal from that which the name of Jesus 
represents. It is absolutely essential to teach 
this ideal to our generation with freedom and 
heartiness. 

As a matter of fact the world of Christen- 
dom has never taken Jesus' life seriously as a 
possible life to pattern after. The world does 
not now take it in earnest. "Ah," men say, 
when Jesus is mentioned, "His life was out of 
the common. It was supernatural. No one 
else could do as he did; no one can be like him." 
The words, the "leadership of Jesus" in certain 
mottoes doubtless set before most people the 
figure of a somewhat exalted personage, walk- 
ing in advance and apart from the rest of the 
world. Do our Sunday school children think 
that Jesus ever smiled? He is mostly an un- 
real man, with an unreal or quite exceptional 
mission. This is unfortunate for the teaching 
of the art of the good life as normal and glad- 
some. People actually come to use the excep- 
tional character of Jesus' life as an excuse 



8o WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

for doing nothing practical with his noblest 
teachings! 

More important yet, as we have already 
shown, there are very naturally elements in 
the story of the actual Jesus which appear seri- 
ously misleading and even unethical in the light 
of our best spiritual truth. Men call Jesus' 
example difficult and "unpractical" on the side 
of his faith, his sense of duty, his devotion, 
his non-resistance, but they constantly cite his 
frequent use of anger and denunciation. We 
cannot afford any longer to let them quote that 
unlovely passage about his driving out the 
money-changers from the temple, whenever jus- 
tification is wanted for bitter words, for a quar- 
rel or a war. We cannot permit men to use 
Jesus' mighty example for calling their fel- 
lows hypocrites and "a generation of vipers"; 
we cannot let them quote his authority for buy- 
ing swords. 2 

Men have indeed often put a high use to the 
question: "What would Jesus do?" as a mode 
of guidance in problems of conduct. What 

2 Luke xxii. 36. But compare the fine passage Matt, xxvi 

52. 



CERTAIN POSITIVE CONCLUSIONS Si 

they really mean is what would the most per- 
fect man do? They evidently cannot know 
what the actual Jesus would have done for ex- 
ample, with the problem of temperance in the 
United States, or with the backward races, or 
even with legislation upon the subject of di- 
vorce. Each man proposes as Jesus' pre- 
sumable answer the judgment of his own con- 
science. The Italian Roman Catholic or 
German Lutheran sees no moral difficulty in the 
story that Jesus made wine out of water and 
prescribed the perpetual use of wine in the 
sacrament of the Eucharist. Millions of peo- 
ple in America- on the other hand see in wine 
no longer the symbol of pure joy but of de- 
grading temptation. Such considerations sug- 
gest the absence of any express or infallible 
ethical standard to which men may resort as to 
an oracle and have an answer to their ques- 
tions free of the costly discipline of thought, ex- 
perience and sympathy. Is not this because 
ethical and spiritual development, so far from 
being based on a set of finite rules, is an end- 
less process of movement toward the conception 
of an infinite Good Will? The loss of per- 



82 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

sonal acquaintance with the actual Jesus, — a 
man who stands in the past, — is in fact the 
facing about towards the noblest ideal of the 
living God. 

Meanwhile the need and the sense of per- 
sonal companionship in the good life do not 
depend at all upon the belief in Jesus as the only 
perfect man. Who does not have the ideal 
companionship of actual friends among the liv- 
ing as well as among the departed? In other 
words, we steady our consciences many a time 
by asking: What would my father or my 
mother, my wife or my friend do and say in 
this emergency? This appeal of the imagina- 
tion is as effective as it is to ask: What would 
Jesus do? 

It is often said that a religion must be per- 
sonal. In other words, it must worship a 
founder: its sentiment must cling around a 
single object. There is a valid truth here. It 
is the truth embodied in the faith that God in 
some sense is a person and not an abstract 
force. A vital religion conceives of a Life, an 
Intelligence, a Good Will, with whom we can 
come into unison, who may reverently be said 



CERTAIN POSITIVE CONCLUSIONS 83 

to care for or love us, in doing whose will we 
have peace, satisfaction and gladness. In this 
high sense, religion must be personal. 

Religion is also made manifest through sym- 
bols and through persons. But it is not true 
that it is dependent upon a single symbol or 
personal manifestation. Vast as the loss would 
be if we could suppose the history of religion 
to be blotted out to the beginning of the eigh- 
teenth century, we surely could not therefore 
lose religion. The fact is, there are many sym- 
bols and numerous personal manifestations of 
religion. It has been said that Jesus showed 
both what God is like and what man may be. 
We say a larger thing. The present genera- 
tion has seen thousands of men and women 
who have shown us what God is like and what 
man may be. He is indeed poor who has not 
known some such beautiful life. When there- 
fore Jesus takes his natural place in the march- 
ing ranks of mankind we have not lost a single 
personal element from our religion. We be- 
hold a great company of lovable, heroic and 
admirable lives. 

There is one great use of Jesus' life which 



84 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

will perhaps always remain. In many respects 
he stands as a familiar and notable type of 
humanity. The old view of him as the single 
Savior of the human race passes away as soon 
as men cease to think of themselves as a 
doomed, or "lost" race, that is, wherever the 
modern evolutionary doctrine holds good of a 
race in process of becoming. But there is a 
continual need, no longer for a unique Savior, 
but for innumerable helpers, saviors and lovers 
of men. Jesus is doubtless the best known 
name among this great and growing class. 

Again, it seems to be a spiritual law that no 
one can be a helper of his fellows, except 
through obedience to a deep law of cost. 
It matters little whether one dies or lives 
for the sake of his fellows. He must in any 
case give his life cheerfully in order to lift the 
level of the common humanity. Jesus' case is 
the typical instance of this great law of cost 
and willingness. But we all have to obey it. 
Every good mother knows it as well as Jesus. 

I wish to leave the impression as strong as 
possible that we have gained and not lost any- 
thing, in this view of Jesus. Let me make my 



CERTAIN POSITIVE CONCLUSIONS 85 

meaning clear by a simple parable. A child 
was once given a costly gem. It was wrapped 
in many coverings and hidden away in a dark 
closet so that he rarely could see it. He fond- 
ly supposed that it was the only gem in the 
world. At last a whole handful of beautiful 
jewels were set before him. Is he poorer or 
richer than before? Is he poorer because he 
now knows more than ever about gems? He 
does not even care in his joy at the variety of 
beauty before him, which gem is the largest or 
the most near mathematical perfectness in his 
collection. 

It remains to treat Jesus naturally, as we 
treat all the benefactors of our race. With all 
modesty, we do not range ourselves exclusively 
as the disciples of any single great man, not of 
Socrates or Plato in philosophy, not of Homer 
or Dante in poetry, not of Michael Angelo or 
Praxiteles in art, not of Beethoven or Wagner 
in music, not of Newton or Bacon or Darwin 
in science. We use and enjoy and admire 
them all. We make all of them serve as object 
lessons, each in his own way. Our wealth of 
human interest and sympathy thus grows 



86 WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

larger. Marching in one grand procession, 
they all and each of them stir us to practical 
effort and valid hope, better than a single 
unique, lonely, and unattainable Master, if such 
there were, could ever stir us. There is a new 
sense of a grand companionship to which we 
all belong. 

This natural view of Jesus is in line, as the 
exclusive and exaggerated view of him is not 
in line, with the whole trend of the democratic 
thought of our age. To most men even yet 
Jesus is the center and head of a monarchical 
scheme of religion. It is easy to bow in church 
and make a king of one who lived and died 
twenty centuries ago. Such homage costs lit- 
tle reflection and no effort of substantial good 
will. The democratic ideal, on the other hand, 
conceives of a host of men, all of one common 
nature, all associated together as members of 
one family, all needing both to help and to be 
helped, to give and to take of each other, to 
teach and to be taught, to inspire and to be in- 
spired by every fresh act and word of friend- 
liness and devotion. There is here no one 
Master or Leader or Savior — like a king-cell 



CERTAIN POSITIVE CONCLUSIONS 87 

in the human body. There is reciprocity; 
there is mutuality. If one has it in him to 
show the structure and the gleam of the dia- 
mond, all men also may show the same glint, 
and enter into the same beautiful structure. 
This alone is spiritual democracy. 

The only objection to this view of Jesus' rel- 
ative place in the world of men comes from the 
side of the temporary hurt to our sentiment. 
The same sentimental opposition was once 
raised to a democratic government, free of any 
sole figure of a king to revere, and about whom 
to rally the nation. It has been found that 
the sentiment of loyalty may be more mighty 
and effective, as well as far more sane, among 
the citizens of a republic than among the sub- 
jects of an empire. It has been found that men 
are abundantly willing to die for the sentiment 
of a rational citizenship in a great republic. 
Be sure that no sentiment which is good for 
anything can be permanently harmed by facing 
the light of day. 

This view of Jesus' relation to human na- 
ture is absolutely called for by the practical 
purposes of ethical education. You cannot 



WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT JESUS 

easily make the life of Jesus interesting and 
persuasive to the ordinary boy or youth. 
There is too little usable incident. Throwing 
out the wonder-stories, there is a fatal lack of 
material to make into continuous lessons suf- 
ficient for several years of Bible study. Bar- 
ring exceptions and the work of teachers of 
marked genius, the child's mind becomes weary 
of the study of Jesus. The scenery is foreign 
to him, and the moral and spiritual experiences 
are remote. How many Sunday school teach- 
ers have ever had such an acquaintance with 
Jesus' life in any of its phases as to be able 
to make young people acquainted with it? 

Take your freedom now! Use Jesus just 
as you would use any other grand figure of the 
distant past, precisely as it happens to impress 
you. Use it much or little, for your own help 
or for the training of youth, just so far as it 
commends itself to you as usable. Then add to 
it, in democratic and natural fashion, all the 
treasures of biographical material with which 
our world is growing rich. Add the lives of 
men and women who have impressed them- 
selves upon our own generation, and have 



CERTAIN POSITIVE CONCLUSIONS 89 

helped to make human history nobler. Tell as 
many stories from every source as you can, all 
going to show the glory, the success, the happi- 
ness, the health of the good life. Has not the 
impulse come to you toward this life, almost 
as if from the atmosphere you breathe? It is 
doubtless the atmosphere of goodwill. See to 
it that this atmosphere is around your youth 
in the home, as well as in the church, or Sun- 
day-school room. 

Be sure that there is that in human life 
which is greater than the greatest man. It is 
the spirit of man, or rather the spirit of God. 
Wherever the good spirit is there is God. 
Wherever this spirit is in history, history 
ceases to be profane and becomes sacred. 
Wherever this spirit possesses men there is not 
one son of God, but all are God's children. 
Nothing less than this is the gospel for to-day. 



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